I’ve been following Joost for a while (who hasn’t?). If you are unfamiliar with it, it’s the new venture of Skype and Kazaa entrepreneurs Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, where the latter of the two may just be the winner of this year’s weird-name-award.

They’re brilliant. Of course they are. I, like so many others, envy them for a gzillion reasons. They realized early on that if you get enough users of your product you can give it away for free and still make tons of money.

The ad revenues along with the 0,01 percent of users that pay for a premium version made eBay pay them the equivalent of a third world country’s GDP to let go of Skype. They did.

Enter Joost.

Where Kazaa and Skype fulfilled a need that, at the given point in time, was not available anywhere else, Joost comes up short. TV for everyone via the net. Sounds cool enough but here’s where they lose me.

1) Content is King. On TV more than anywhere else.
The content of Joost is near non-existent. The content you want on Joost is House MD, CSI, ER, Grey’s Anatomy etc. If you want user driven content, watching Joe Neighbor teaching his dog to yodel, you go to YouTube and the now endless piggy backers of the aforementioned pioneer site.

2) All TV-shows worth watching end up on the net’s torrent sites fast. Very fast.
Most of the time before they’re even aired in the US, mainly because the Australian schedule is ahead in time.

3) The technical issues are plentiful.
Streaming via peer-2-peer may be an excellent idea but so far it has yet to impress someone who’s used to 1080p on their TV/Computer.

Joost clearly has some terrain to cover still, to prove to us - the users - that it’s worthwhile downloading and browsing i.e. spending time with their product and the brands they want to push via it. Right now Joost isn’t there.

I think Joost need to figure out where they want to be in the market and what supply vacuum they should be filling. Perhaps producing their own content is the only way, because relying on users to do it for them won’t work. We got so many options that are easier and frankly better for that purpose.

Scene 1

JD, looking nervously at the janitor:

 - Hey man, how’s it going?

The Janitor, on a ladder fixing a light-bulb, looking down at JD:

 - I’m 37 years old. I’m a janitor. How do you think it’s going?

With many other TV-shows, they get really good season 2 and can last to maybe season 3-4, when all the characters have found their jargon. With Scrubs it’s almost the other way around. Season one is a total blast. I’m laughing out loud.

Whatever Internet once was, it is now an advertising arena where links have become a highly valued commodity.

Companies have been started around it (blogvertising etc.) and nowadays everyone and their dog knows that nothing is more valuable in terms of ending up at the top of your favourite search engine, than a link from a trustworthy source.

You can have all the H1, H2 and TITLE-tweaks you want, but nothing brings you faster to #1 SERP than a bunch of good links.

The more trustworthy the source, the more valuable the link. I don’t think that it has truly caught on for everyone in schools and other governmental or federal institutions exactly how valuable a link from them really are.

A link from an .EDU or even better a .GOV source, is today something that many would pay a lot of money for. For sure.

Ultimately, if you don’t watch out, it can start to change how you think as a publisher for the worse. You start writing about subjects you know contain high paying keywords, or worse, you write about a subject just to be able to link to someone who’s further down the food chain than you, and get paid for it. Reduced credibility inevitably follows.

Anyway, it’s not all bad. I like advertising, and I like the game it comes with. Trying to stay ahead of the herd. Internet is more business than ever, and the ways to monetize from it is really beginning to become clear.

Sooner than we think it will be clear to everyone, and that’s when the early adopters can begin to cash in big, and the followers need to think about what will be the next big thing.

Where are you going to be?

First of all, let me say that I like social communities and I’ve been a proponent of it for a long time. Back in the 80’s when I was around 12-14 years old I used to call Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) with my 300/300 baud modem - yes that’s correct 300 bits/s - connected to my Commodore 64 and doing basically the same thing that drives people to Facebook and other social networks; communicating with friends.

My problem is not with the idea of Facebook but with the implementation of it.

Facebook will crumble and be replaced by other communities in the future for a couple of reasons, one of which is spelled FBML. That’s the reason Textpattern was succeeded by Wordpress and if you don’t know what Textpattern is, you’ve more than proved my point.

Much like Textpattern - which had equal market share with Wordpress a little over a year ago - Facebook decided to go with its own Meta Language. That rarely sits well with developers. Spending time learning something that is likely to be a fad is not something that anyone likes to do. You do it because you have to. You do it because there’s no alternative.

Now there’s an alternative.

OpenSocial by Google is about to be launched, and if it has the hallmarks of any other Google product, it’s likely to be good. Very good.

OpenSocial is an API in standard code that hooks into a variety of social networks i.e. you will be able to re-use your already existing PHP code and not tweak it half as much as when writing your Facebook apps.

There are other reasons that Facebook eventually will fade away, such as the fact that it has no original idea behind it (easy to switch to another network more close to home, whenever such network becomes available), and that it’s gone totally overboard already with media coverage, which is usually the tell tale sign that something’s passed its peak.

No matter how many other reasons, I believe the main reason is the fact that grass roots will leave it whenever a viable option becomes available to spread cool apps and get to show the world how great you are using standard code languages. That time is approaching fast.